If there was one group of players likely to be surprised by yesterday's announcement that Amazon was working on a new Lord of the Rings MMO, it was likely to be fans of the current Lord of the Rings MMO. But for fans for Lord of the Rings Online, the new kid on the block isn't anything to worry about.
The Lord of the Rings Online launched in the MMO heyday of 2007, a time when games like World of Warcraft and Runescape were riding high among the best MMORPGs you could play. LOTRO didn't ever really challenge the biggest names in the genre, but it managed to live at a time when many other massively-multiplayer projects died an early death. Focused closely on Tolkein's work and the time period of The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy, it's maintained a dedicated-enough playerbase to warrant new expansions more than a decade after its original launch.
